Missouri's bridges show improvement, still have deficiencies

State recently worked to repair some of its worst bridges

A new report indicates that some problems remain with the state of Missouri's bridges, but they're in better shape than they used to be.

The state recently worked to address problems with some of its most dangerous spans, but the Federal Highway Administration still consider 14 percent of them to be structurally deficient.

KMBC 9's Micheal Mahoney reported that part of the problem is Missouri's size. The state has 24,000 bridges, many of which are aging.

Mahoney said the people who built the bridges figured they would be replaced by now.

"If you look at the age of our bridges, many are past their prime," said Kevin Eisenbies of Burns & McDonnell. "They're beyond their useful life."

The Kansas City district of the Missouri Department of Transportation did not discuss the findings of the most recent study.

Burns & McDonnell, which builds bridges all over the world, said even older bridges aren't just built and ignored.

"Every bridge in the nation is required to be inspected every two years. That's federal law that all the states have to obey," said Burns & McDonnell engineer Jugesh Kapr.

The bridges in Missouri considered to be structurally deficient have at least one major component that has serious deterioration and is classified in poor condition.

The situation had been worse. Several years ago, Missouri launched its Safe and Sound program, which tackled more than 800 bridge repair projects. The program, which finished well ahead of schedule, addressed the problem, but didn't solve it.

MoDOT wanted to see if voters would approve a sales tax increase for road improvements, but the Missouri Legislature didn't go for it.

Engineers said repairing and maintaining bridges can be expensive.

"The beams, the deck, a lot of rebar goes into the structure," said Kapr. "All of that adds up to a pretty high cost per square foot."

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